@kanuck & @Rifqi: you two are going to make me start investing in Black Flag. Bring on the Devil lets see if he can handle the Flag :)
@Juergen: You almost had me there....but I then again: What big eye you got. Nice shot mate.
@Bland: I must confess..it took me like 20 minutes before I could figured out how to get the dam link. Hell, I almost start a tread in asking for help then I saw the "share button." It was one of those V8 moments, if you get my meaning :P

So there I was walking down the street of Jerome and I cam across this car and look what the owner of the car has decided to put on his car as a hood ornament. Need less to say, I had to take a shot it. And yes I did try to turn the handles to see if something would come out but to no a vale...it was glued down good.

Here is my "One and a Half" post in celebration of 1500 posts on NRF, ha, ha, ha.....

This was an average aquarium, lighting not very bright. D4, 16-35mm f/4.0 VR Nikkor at 30mm. 1/160 sec, f/4.0 ISO 10,000 with a - 0.7 ev. The aquarium was relatively clean, estimated 1 inch thick lexan or other plastic. So, the optical properties were less than ideal. At Disney something in Orlando, Florida.

I can't compete with that, but here is a male Pieris Brassicae (Large or commonly known as a 'Cabbage' White). I grew wildflowers and foodplants in my front garden this year to help our pollinators and this little fella pupated on my front window. I missed the emergence by half an hour :(.

@framer – While I’m not that happy with the image, the technique was fairly straightforward. I used Photoshop CS5, Bridge and ACR, but the key was a free script called Russel Brown’s Stack-A-Matic. I don’t have CS5 Extended, so I was unable to use the technique described by Deborah Sandidge on the Nikon site. (that technique uses “Statistics – Maximum” and smart objects to blend the exposures whereas I ended up using “Blend-Lighten” and individual layers.)

In any case I set up the tripod, framed the image, set the shutter release to MUp, and exposure to bulb. I took some test shots to get the exposure how I wanted it for a 30 second shutter. I then used a wireless release and started taking images.

Once at my computer, I then followed the video tutorial at Russel Brown’s site http://www.russellbrown.com/scripts.html which basically had me open the images in bridge, adjust the images as a batch in ACR and then invoke the script which took all of the images into Photoshop. The images were each opened into a separate layer with the layer blend mode set to “Lighten”. I did go into some of the layers to edit out a bit of a bright line left by boat lights.

I was very surprised by the shape of the star trails. I expected curved lines for all of the stars. However, when Photoshop did the auto alignment of the images, the program was also able to recognize the Milky Way. So the area around the brightest part of the Milky Way was morphed to allow that portion of the Milky Way to line up from image to image. Consequently, the stars in that part of the image have been moved to help the alignment. The alignment of the moving Milky Way and the stationary landscape resulted in a morphing of the sky that provides the unusual star trails.

@Yetibuddha - Nice reflection!
I considered Startrails, but I wanted the bit depth and the ability to edit the individual frames. Then I found out that StarTrails did not run on a Mac. Since it seemed like a lot of bother to download Startrails for use in a windows partition on my Mac, I haven't tried it yet... Although the Youtube video I saw made it look pretty good. Have you tried it?

Around 12 and 13 august we will have 100's of falling stars at nighttime. Maybe we can fit a small "stars theme" in those two days?

This is a picture of me holding a kite. I was with my daughter (3 yo) she wanted to see the kite in action but is to little to hold it. :)
When I was editing this picture I constanly thought about a song of a Dutch singer called André Hazes with a song called: "de Vlieger" which means "The Kite". It's a song about a boy who got a lot of presents for his birthday. But the only thing the boy wants is to play with his kite. The reason he wants to play with his kite is because he wants to attach a letter to the kite so his mother which is in heaven can read how much he misses her.